• argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    What value is the transport that brings me food produced thousands of kilometers from where I live, when it could’ve been produced locally, requiring no transport?

    Then you’d starve to death the first time a localized crop failure happened in your area.

    Even before that, your diet would be limited to whatever can be grown in your area. Areas unsuitable for agriculture would be rendered completely uninhabitable, which is the last thing we need in this age of severe housing scarcity and climate migration.

    The global food distribution system has its inefficiencies, but it exists for a reason.

    What value is the bureaucracy that keeps this exceedingly complex system working, when a smaller, easily manageable community would provide the same amount of well being?

    It wouldn’t, and you need only open a history book to learn why. Life before global civilization was violent, painful, hungry, toilsome, and short.

    I don’t think any task is fit only for machines.

    Then you are in favor of wasting human potential. I can only hope that the majority disagrees with you on this point, or we’ll never explore the stars.

    That line of thinking, especially when applied to agriculture, leads to loss of skills, authenticity, and connection to our ecosystems

    That’s rosy retrospection. History is not full of people leading full, idyllic, one-with-nature lives and passing away with a smile on a bed of flowers.

    It’s full of malnourished peasants forced to do unpaid back-breaking labor for their local warlord, only to be unceremoniously killed by the henchmen of some other local warlord.

    Modern civilization, for all its faults, has done much to improve the standard of human life.